“With respect to religion, altho’ Mr. M’Kean was pleased to number it among the things that were in danger from the licentiousness of the press, and of course from poor me, I think it would puzzle the devil himself to produce from my writings, a single passage, which could, by all the powers of perversion be twisted into an attack upon it. But it would on the contrary be extremely easy to prove, that I have at all times, when an opportunity offered, repelled the attacks of its enemies, the abominable battalions of Deists and Atheists, with all my heart, with all my mind, with all my soul, and with all my strength. The bitterest drop in my pen has ever been bestowed upon them; because, of all the foes of the human race, I look upon them, after the devil, as being the greatest and most dreadful. Not a sacrilegious plunderer from Henry VIII. to Condorcet, and from Condorcet to the impious Sans-culottes of France, has escaped my censure. All those, who have attempted to degrade religion whether by open insults and cruelties to the clergy, by blasphemous publications or by the more dangerous poison of the malignant modern philosophy, I have ranked amongst the most infamous of mankind, and have treated them accordingly.”
In the concluding part of his tract the author clearly convicts the Judge of the most decided and most flagrant partiality. He quotes a number of infamous libels, on religious and political subjects, which had never roused the indignation, nor even excited the censure, of those whose duty it is to preserve the public peace and to enforce a due observance of the laws. If, indeed, we were to judge, from this specimen, of the mode of administring justice in America, in matters of libel, we should conclude, that every degree of licentiousness is allowed to those who seek to debauch the minds of the people, to seduce them from their allegiance, and to dissolve every tie which religion and morality have formed for the happiness of men in a social state, while the upright supporters of virtue, whose labours are directed to the prevention of anarchy and rebellion, by detecting the views and exposing the machinations of their abettors, are the sole objects not merely of prosecution but of persecution.
The abuse bestowed on the mild and beneficent sovereigns of these realms by the Democratic factions in the American Congress, is almost equal in severity to the censures lavished by some members of opposition during the last parliament in the British Senate, on the Kings of Prussia and Hungary, before those monarchs had become allies of France.
The following extracts will, at once, afford a criterion of the political principles of public men, in the State of Pennsylvania, and a curious specimen of republican morality.
“The Governor (Mifflin) attended at a civic festival, when the following toasts were drunk, which were published in most of the newspapers.[[331]]
“‘Those illustrious citizens sent to Botany Bay. May they be speedily recalled by their country in the day of her regeneration.’
“‘May the spirit of parliamentary reform in Britain and Ireland burst the bonds of corruption, and overwhelm the foes of liberty.’
“‘The sans-culottes of France. May the robes of all the Emperors, Kings, Princes, and Potentates [not excepting the King of Spain] now employed in suppressing the flame of liberty, be cut up to make breeches.’
“This is pretty ‘decent’ in a Governor; but without stopping to remark on the peculiar decency of his toasting a gang of convicts, let us come to another instance of his conduct, full as ‘decent’ as this.
“At the civic festival, held in this city in 1794, to celebrate the dethronement of ‘our great and good ally, Louis XVI.’ there were ‘assembled,’ according to the ‘procès verbal’ which was sent to the Paris convention, ‘the CHIEFS, civil and military’. This procès verbal contains a letter to the convention, in which the following honourable mention is made of the governor. ‘The Governor of Pennsylvania, that ardent friend of the French republic, was present, and partook of all our enthusiasm and all our sentiments.’[[332]]